Systems for biological and biochemical reactions have been used to monitor, measure, and/or analyze such reactions in real time. Such systems are commonly used in sequencing, genotyping, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and other biochemical reactions to monitor the progress and provide quantitative data.
Currently, there is an increasing demand to provide greater numbers of reactions per test or experiment have resulted in instruments that are able to conduct ever higher numbers of reactions simultaneously. The increase in the number sample sites in a test or experiment has led to microtiter plates and other sample formats that provide ever smaller sample volumes. In addition, techniques such as digital PCR (dPCR) have increased the demand for smaller sample volumes that contain either zero or one target nucleotide sequence in all or the majority of a large number of test samples.
Digital PCR may be used to detect and quantify the concentration of rare alleles, to provide absolute quantitation of nucleic acid samples, and to measure low fold-changes in nucleic acid concentration. Generally, increasing the number of replicates increases the accuracy and reproducibility of dPCR results.
In dPCR, a solution containing a relatively small number of a target polynucleotide or nucleotide sequence may be subdivided into a large number of small test samples, such that each sample generally contains either one molecule of the target nucleotide sequence or none of the target nucleotide sequence. When the samples are subsequently thermally cycled in a PCR protocol, procedure, or experiment, the samples containing the target nucleotide sequence are amplified and produce a positive detection signal, while the samples containing no target nucleotide sequence are not amplified and produce no detection signal.
For further analysis, the immense number of data points the data collected from a dPCR experiment is challenging to organize and visualize in a manner that is useful to a user.